Monday, October 19, 2009

The solar systems were turned on just one year ago - time to review its performance to date.

I'm happy to report that it has exceeded all expectations.

On a subjective level, it has been a joy to live and work in - warm in the winter, cool in the summer, light and airy and lovely to look at all year round. I am also delighted to report that I have not had one minute of trouble with any of the systems - high praise indeed from a guy who hates maintenance and repair, and who has had his share of woes while living in a number of conventionally built houses over the years. The solar systems in the Barn are simple, with few moving parts, and highly reliable - so far, they just work.

On an objective plane, here are the numbers. In its first year, BBB produced 6345 kilowatt hours of electricity, and used 1251 kwh, leaving a surplus of 5094 kwh.

In other words, BBB produced five times as much electricity as it used. My little BBB could power itself and four other homes just like it.

According to the US Department of Energy, the average American home uses 936 kwh of electricity per month. So, the average home in the US uses as much electricity in 5 weeks as the Barn did in its first full year. Conversely, BBB produces enough electricity to power itself and just under half the yearly electricity use of the average home.

The Barn does, in fact, power my conventionally built main house (over 15 years old and no paragon of energy efficiency) which sits about 100 feet away, and has produced over 60% of that home's electrical use.

So, Happy Birthday, BBB! And congratulations on a highly successful first year!

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The BrightBuilt Barn will have a booth at this weekend's Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors show in Rockland, Maine. We'll be there Friday through Sunday in Tent I, and will be offering tours of the BrightBuilt Barn Saturday afternoon. Stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The May/June Residential Architect included a piece on the BrightBuilt Barn. For those readers who have found their way here, monitoring information on the barn is currently house on our website at www.brightbuiltbarn.com

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Check out this article in the latest Journal of Light Construction, an excellent magazine for Home Builders and a source of great info for all residential architects and consultants as well. It is written by a local builder of all things sustainable and good, Dan Kolbert, and describes a recent project we completed together in Falmouth, Maine for our excellent clients, Stew MacLehose and Kathy Hayden. Kolbert is quickly becoming one of the top sustainable home builders in the region. He already has a LEED Gold and a LEED Platinum under his belt. Time to loosen that belt another notch, Dan...

This project is on track for LEED Platinum Certification. It features cellulose-filled, double stud walls, triple glazed windows and an exceptionally tight envelope in the range of BrightBuilt and Passivehouse (0.77 ACH5o). It has solar hot water and is slated to get some PV on the roof soon too.

We will soon make available live energy data on this project as well, in the same format as our BrightBuilt data, through our friends at Powerdash.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Kaplan Thompson Architects, the team that designed BrightBuilt Barn, have recently been notified that their Metro Green project in Arlington, Virginia has been awarded LEED Platinum, the first LEED Platinum home in the state of Virginia.

Sited only 5 miles from the center of Washington DC, the structure has a whole wish list of green features, including a green roof and rainwater capture, in addition to solar electric energy and super-low heating costs.

BrightBuilt Barn Media Kit

About the BrightBuilt Barn

Here we follow the design and construction of a Net-zero energy barn built in Rockport, Maine - the result of a 2 year long collaborative effort between architects, builders, high performance building experts and a visionary client who wanted to make a small building with a LARGE impact.

This building is, and was always to be:SustainableAffordableReplicableEducationalDisentangledand of course, Beautiful

The BrightBuilt project is unshakably committed to two overarching concepts:

Our commitment to Sustainability

1. We believe that, for the first time in human history, the scale of human activity threatens to outstrip the capacity of the global environment to absorb its effects.2. Consequently, we hold that each of us alive today bears a special responsibility to work toward a way of life that can sustain human life indefinitely, so that we leave a world where our grandchildren may have grandchildren.3. We conclude that our reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable in the long run, and may need to be eliminated in our lifetime if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.4. We are convinced that buildings contribute significantly to adverse global climate change, due to the greenhouse gases that are emitted as a consequence of their construction, as well as the greenhouse gases released in generating the heat and power that are consumed in heating, lighting, and otherwise running them.

For all of these reasons and more, we dedicate ourselves to discover, improve, and publicize sustainable ways of designing, constructing, and powering buildings.

Our Commitment to Open Source Collaboration

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."Eric S. Raymond from his essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” on the advantages of open source methods of software development

1. We embrace the methods of open source collaboration, which have given the world such world class products as Wikipedia, the Mozilla web browser, the Linux operating system, and the Apache web server, among many others.2. We believe that the methods of open source collaboration, although they originated in the field of software development, are perfectly general, and may be applied to any field of intellectual endeavor.3. In our view, the essence of open source collaboration consists of the application of many minds to a common problem, with free sharing of ideas, the elimination of proprietary barriers, and the successive application of many small improvements.4. We believe that open source collaboration promises to be the fastest, most practical way to achieve rapid evolution of ideas for sustainable building design and construction.5. Our hope is that by sharing what we’ve learned with others, they too will embrace and necessarily improve on these building systems that we have put forth. We look at the first BrightBuilt Barn not as “the solution”, but rather as one step in the great, ongoing evolution of the Sustainable Home within a global context. If this first BrightBuilt model is not largely obsolete within 10 years, we will have failed in our mission.